All posts tagged with scanning-operations

These days with digital cameras built into your phone, most everyone has some first hand experience creating digital images. Creating the nearly 40 million page images on BHL is in many ways similar what you probably do on a daily basis with your phone – it’s really just a matter of scale in terms of the technology used for the digitization and the special care taken with the books.

Sometime over the past weekend, the Biodiversity Heritage Library portal loaded it’s 10 millionth page!

Due to the way volumes are ingested from the various scanning centers, it’s a bit tricky to pick which was the EXCACT 10 millionth page, but for the sake of this blog post, I’m going to say that it was one of the pages of Coleopterorum catalogus by Junk and Schenkling. I’m picking this item because, as you taxonomic cognoscenti out there know, beetles (coleoptera) represent, perhaps, the most common type of animal. Indeed, the noted biologist J.B.S. Haldane is reputed to have quipped that, if nothing else, nature reveals that God has “an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

Learn more about the BHL harvest process from Internet Archive.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is currently scanning material five locations around the world. As materials are scanned, they are deposited directly into the Internet Archive repository.

On August 15, 2007, Internet Archive staff (Melissa Bell) began scanning BHL materials at Smithsonian Libraries. The Smithsonian Libraries’ Scribe joins operations in Boston, London, and Urbana-Champaign that are contributing to the Biodiversity Heritage Library.